Does anyone remember that programme Super-Size Vs Super-Skinny? Falstaffian ‘fatties’ – the super-sizers – would have the unenviable task of switching diets with petrol-guzzling Tiny Tim’s – the super-skinnies – which was grossly unfair (by the way I’m convinced if the world had Monster during the 1973 Petrol Crisis, it could have been avoided). Wouldn’t you rather eat Chinese takeaway or cream cakes for breakfast than confront liquid lunches and a lone jammy dodger for dinner three days straight?

I admired the stoicism of these men and women, humiliated on TV and all whilst cameras shoved in your face to an audience of millions. The programme tried to fob itself off as educational by wheeling in Christian Jessen as a passive-aggressive Mrs Trunchbull, carting off the Super-Sizers to Las Vegas to spend a day with wheel-chair bound double amputees in a stark warning that “If you keep eating all that sugar, the risk of diabetes means this could be you”.

The reality is that these sorts of programmes are about one thing and one thing only: shame. It was unadulterated voyeurism on gluttony. ‘Shame-TV’ luckily, has become unfashionable. Jeremey Kyle style finger-wagging called out for what it was; bullying, but on a national scale. Morally, the onus wasn’t on helping people with their issues but bringing us – the customer – the opportunity to ridicule, gawping with orange-tinged fingers tips as we whipped out our third packet of Doritos. We projected onto them our own shame and struggle to meet unrealistic beauty standards.

I remember my first real heart-wrenching bout of shame because I documented it in my teenage diary. Horrified at the black curly hair suddenly sprouting underneath my armpits, I wrote long, agonising paragraphs of complete repulsion and self-contempt (yes, yes it’s funny, I know). It wasn’t like that in the glossy magazines at the hairdresser, what was wrong with me? I loathed my bodies revolt, and Instagram exacerbated it.

Shame doesn’t work. It’s counterproductive as a deterrent, and it rarely changes behaviour, especially if its roots are in childhood. Did Jessen think he could cure years of comfort eating and emotional baggage in a three-day clinic on national TV?

When Matt Hancock barks on about ‘Don’t kill your Granny’ shame is his ammunition. The community spirit invoked at the beginning of the pandemic dismissed in favour of snitching and social humiliation. If you want the nation to alter its ingrained habits, this isn’t the way to go about it. Mostly, adherence to the rules has been good. When the government said lockdown, we cleared our calendars, took children out of school, packed away our social life and turned indoors. The tone has grown significantly worse since then in favour of spying over the neighbour’s hedge and lambasting the young for wanting to see friends and have fun. And it doesn’t work.

What we all respond to is incentives, gentle nudging, social and personal responsibility, and a sense of doing the right thing. Whether it’s losing a few pounds or learning to socialise in a different way: this is how people change.